Luba Grenader

Life Paused: Women and War


The world seems to be torched by war in one place or another at any point in time. In most cases fighting and bravery associated with war tends to also correlate with masculinity. However, what about women: combatants of course, but also, those who are “fighting” for life in the midst of war torn lands while struggling to protect their lives and the lives of their children, their homes and their communities? How often do we, as public outside of a war zone, sympathize not only with the military but also with the civilians, the most powerless of whom are women, those who are caught in the midst of war by chance of their geographical placement and who end up wounded, tortured, raped or killed regardless of their allegiances? As humans we all suffer, both men and women, both during times of war and times of peace. However, war questions life, the very life which women perpetuate, nurture and sustain.

Life Paused: Women and War is a body of mixed-media drawings, which is dedicated to those women who are and have been caught in the midst of war with all its devastations such as death, torture, suffering, fear and who are, while dealing with these horrors, still trying to sustain life and to preserve dignity despite an often ensued bodily harm and emotional shame.


The intensity of the subject matter dictates the choice for my materials. The wooden pieces and boards, which I utilize as both “canvas” and working materials, resemble life easily destroyed by fire. At the same time, wood can be a very resilient material and of course, its origin, a tree, is a living entity, which usually grows among its equivalents and as such resembles a human “community”. I often engrave the images on wood with a burning tool to reflect on scars left by war, both physical and emotional.

 


I also consider these pieces “thread-drawings” where thread is used as a drawing tool making linear connections between the parts. Conceptually, thread also reflects on life’s passages and connections, which can be easily broken but also possibly mended. The initial image, which is inscribed by drawing, painting or burning, then becomes a ghost underneath the flesh of threads and other textiles. Thus, sketching becomes a prerequisite for further textile exploration of the form. The needle moves in various directions in a repetitive motion and is either pulled through staples and wire or sewn through fabric and paper in order to cover an area with linear movements and in order to make certain visual connections. The thread is a versatile drawing tool and can create perfectly straight lines while its strands can also be intertwined with one another creating more complex layers.

This work is figurative in nature, however, the layer of the “thread-drawing” or of another textile covering is of a more abstract character where the thread-lines become almost veins on an outside of sketched bodies. Rather then following the lines of the body, the thread creates lines, which by virtue of certain connections become an encrypted collaboration of linear elements expressive of the work’s more conceptual properties. I often alter an initial bodily drawing by slashing or cutting off its various parts. Then, by utilizing sewing, I am able to mend the initial forms into metamorphosed bodies. This method of drawing, undoing and mending allows for an expression of pain, tension and emotional coping.

Through this work I hope to remind myself, as well as the viewers, that in times of war women are forced to continue to give birth, nurture and sustain life in the face of terror, fear, shame, and to often see that same life to disintegrate through the loss of their children and husbands to war’s horrors, as well as the fall of their own bodies through shameful rape or torture.